George A. Mason Second Sunday after Epiphany Wilshire Baptist Church 14 January 2018 Second in a series, Renewing the Jesus Movement Dallas, Texas Seeing Things John 1:43-51 Last week I told you we would follow the Gospel of Mark throughout Epiphany as we seek to renew the Jesus movement for our time. But today the lectionary divines slip in a passage from John s Gospel, since John doesn t get a whole year like Matthew, Mark and Luke. We need to let John interject from time to time with his unique way of seeing the Jesus story. And seeing is key for John. Seeing is believing. Seeing is knowing. See what I mean? See what I did there? We use the language of seeing in similar ways as John does. What John wants us to see is the way Jesus sees things; then he invites us to see things as Jesus does. And that takes some work on our part. We re prone to looking, not seeing. We glance at things and draw conclusions on the basis of the surfaces of things. Jesus looks deeper and sees things at their core. His eyes don t deceive him the way ours often do. Look at this encounter with Nathaniel at the beginning of his ministry, when Jesus is calling his disciples. To set this situation up, you should know that Jesus has left the Judean wilderness, where he was baptized in the Jordan River by John the Baptist. Two of the Baptist s followers had started following Jesus: Andrew and his brother Simon. When Jesus saw that they had started to follow him, he turned and asked, What are you looking for? Again, he continued to use the looking and seeing language. They don t answer him exactly; they ask him where he is staying which is code language in John for What is your relationship to God? Same word as abide or dwell. Jesus answers, Come and see. Then he looks at Simon or better, he looks into Simon and says, You are to be called Cephas which is the Aramaic word for Peter, the rock. In other words, Jesus goes straight to what he sees about the character and potential of Simon, and he names it. We pick up the story with Jesus back in Galilee calling Philip, and Philip going to call Nathaniel. Nathaniel hesitates when he hears where Jesus is from: Nazareth. It s one of those
places how shall I say it? Jesus is not from Norway! Now, just to be clear: I didn t pick this passage for us today. Sometimes you just have to shake your head. I even wonder whether John cleaned up Nathaniel s language. Can anything good come out of Nazareth? Philip just says, Come and see. This wasn t Nathaniel s finest hour. It s a shallow way of looking at the world. Nazareth was a poor village of probably no more than 200 to 400 people where laborers like Jesus father Joseph lived. It was a short walk from the building projects in the Roman town of Zippori, where carpenters and stonemasons like Joseph would have worked. It was very much outside the power structure of society. That s all Nathaniel could think of when he heard the name of the town of Nazareth. And that s all we think of when we stereotype people based on where they re from. My mother would probably like you to know this morning that my people from her side of the family are from Norway. Really. But she would join me in saying that our citizenship is in heaven before it s anywhere here on earth. And any Christian who determines someone s value first on the basis of what country he or she comes from or what color his or her skin is or even what the person can offer at any given moment educationally or economically. Here Nathaniel is seeing before he learns to see like Jesus sees. We have to learn to see people like Jesus sees them if we are ever to offer the world anything but more tribalism and division and prejudice. If you re in this room today or livestreaming ot listening on the radio and you re from Haiti, El Salvador or other countries in Africa, listen to the word of the Lord: you are a beloved child of God. You don t get your worth from the estimation of any pastor or president. You get it from your Creator. And we all have to learn to see each other that way, no matter who we are or where we ve come from. Part of the benefit that churches and their members have in supporting mission efforts in other countries and in going to places that are impoverished and have suffered neglect or devastation is that we get to see close up the remarkable spirit of 2
people everywhere. But we have to be willing to move from our surface seeing to a deeper view of things. Now back to Jesus again. When Jesus sees Nathaniel coming toward him, John says. That ought to pique our interest right there. Jesus says about him: Here is truly an Israelite in whom there is no deceit. Jesus sees him coming and sees right into his heart. He uses the words Israelite and deceit to contrast the father of their people, Jacob that great deceiver who would later be called Israel. Nathaniel can be trusted as Israel; he s no Jacob. Nathaniel doesn t understand how Jesus could have gotten to know him. Jesus tells him that he had already seen Nathaniel when he was sitting under a fig tree. The meaning of this is lost on us, but it wasn t lost on Nathaniel. Immediately, he moves from wondering whether any good thing can come out of Nazareth to calling Jesus Rabbi, Son of God and King of Israel. Nathaniel s encounter with Jesus way of seeing him changes the way Nathaniel sees Jesus. Sarah Silverman is a Jewish comedienne from New York. She s often foul-mouthed herself. But something has gotten into her lately. She has a TV show on Hulu called I Love You, America. She travels around the country meeting people who are different from her socially and politically, seeing them up close and knowing them as human beings. They get to laugh with each other instead of at each other. They learn to see each other differently, more deeply than their previous prejudices allowed. Recently, a man was trolling her on Twitter. He used a crude epithet, calling her a word that begins with the letter c. Instead of blocking him or engaging in a war of words with him, Silverman went to his profile and looked into him more deeply. She read some of his tweets and realized that he was in pain in more than one way. The back and forth that ensued between them was touching and healing. She learned that he suffered from back pain, but also that he had been molested in a Kevin Spacey-sort of way, and it had affected him emotionally. He didn t feel that he could trust anyone, and it made him angry and isolated. She begged him to get some help and to open up to a counselor. She called out to the 3
San Antonio community where he lives to ask whether any there was anyone who could help a man with several slipped disks in his back. She even pledged that money wouldn t be an issue. She also asked him to agree to counseling. The mayor of San Antonio got involved. Things started to happen. Now this man who called Sarah an offensive misogynist name is getting the help he needs to be human again from that same woman. We are all instructed. Sarah saw this man. She saw through his foul statement to his pain. And that s what Jesus teaches us to do. This is Martin Luther King, Jr. s birthday weekend. It s also the 50 th anniversary of his death. We ve had several opportunities to renew our commitment to what he stood for. Last Friday the Reverend William Barber filled the room at Temple Emanu-El in more ways than one. Big man. Big crowd. Big hope. Yesterday some of us went to Friendship West Baptist Church in South Dallas and heard my good colleague and powerful preacher, Dr. Frederick Haynes. He reminded us that we have to look deeper at Dr. King. Our tendency now is to focus on his dream, a dream that, well, you know the lines my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. That s all well and good, but Dr. King himself told us how we should remember him. He wanted to be remembered as being a drum major for justice. The point is this: if you want to honor Dr. King s legacy, it isn t about retelling the dream of unity; it s about addressing the conditions that still make unity a dream. When we see those things and do something about them, then we are really seeing things. We are going to the cause and not staying on the surface, where it s safe. We are getting involved. One reason we fail to see is that we know if we do see, we will have to do something about what we see. If I don t see the panhandler, or pretend not to, I don t need to stop and care or speak or bother or give. This is getting close to home now for me, but Kim is always asking me some version of George, didn t you see that fill in the blank. Garbage cans overflowing, 4
dishes in the sink, whatever. And you know my reply: Ugh, no, honey, I didn t see. This is a practiced and disciplined habit of not seeing, don t you know?! But if we would just come and see as Jesus beckons us, there are greater things we would see. Jesus tells Nathaniel: You think that s something, my seeing you under the fig tree? You come follow me and learn to see as I see, and you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man. We re back to Jacob again here: the Old Testament story of Jacob s ladder. He s sleeping on the ground with a stone for a pillow, when all at once he sees a ladder connecting heaven and earth. The ladder is a staircase, a stairway to Heaven. It showed Jacob that he was in a holy place. There was no separation between heaven and earth. Jesus is saying that he himself is that place. He is the ladder, the staircase, the portal, the door. Or maybe he is the one who shows us just how connected everything is to God all the time. But you will see these things only if you learn to see. And to learn to see, you have to come and see. That is, you have to develop your spiritual eyesight by putting yourself in proximity to Jesus, who is the light of the world and through whom we see all things more clearly. The late David Matthews, who last pastored Royal Lane Baptist Church here in Dallas, once told the story of a man who needed to make a phone call. This is going to take you back now, because he was in a subway station in New York before the era of cell phones. He was standing outside a phone booth, paging through a phone book (I know, phone book, right!), trying to see by the light of the single yellow bulb on the ceiling of the platform. A woman walked by and asked what he was doing. He told her he was trying to read a number, but he couldn t see it because it was so dark. She looked at him in that way women do and said, Well, if you just get all the way into the booth and close the door behind you, the light comes on and you will see everything you need to. Friends, Jesus says to you and me, Come and see. And when we see things through his eyes, we may even start seeing how God is present and at work in this very room. Amen. 5